The British Broadcasting Corporation, invariably known as the BBC (and also informally known as the Beeb or Auntie) is the largest broadcasting corporation in the world, employing 26,000 staff in the UK alone and with a budget of £4 billion.<ref>
Pharr, Susan, Krauss, Ellis (eds.) (1996). Media and Politics in Japan. University of Hawaii Press, p.5. ISBN 824817613.</ref>

Quite often domestic audiences have affectionately referred to the BBC as the Beeb, (coined by Kenny Everett) or as Auntie; the latter said to originate in the somewhat old fashioned Auntie knows best<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> attitude dating back to the early days when John Reith was in charge. Occasionally the terms are used together as Auntie Beeb.

The Company, with John Reith as general manager, became the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1927 when it was granted a Royal Charter of incorporation and ceased to be privately owned. It started experimental television broadcasting in 1932, becoming a regular service (known as the BBC Television Service) in 1936. Television broadcasting was suspended from 1 September, 1939 to 7 June, 1946 during the Second World War. A widely reported urban legend is that, upon resumption of service, announcer Leslie Mitchell started by saying, "As I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted…" In fact, the first person to appear when transmission resumed was Jasmine Bligh, who had also been the last person on air when transmission was interrupted, and the words said were “Good afternoon everybody. How are you? Do you remember me, Jasmine Bligh...?”<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Competition to the BBC was introduced in 1955 with the commercially and independently operated ITV. As a result of the Pilkington Committee report of 1962, in which the BBC were lauded and ITV was very heavily criticised for not providing enough quality programming,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> the BBC were awarded a second TV channel, (BBC 2), in 1964, renaming the existing channel BBC 1. BBC 2 was broadcast in colour from 1 July, 1967, and was joined by BBC 1 and ITV on 15 November, 1969.

In 1974 the BBC's teletext service, CEEFAX, was introduced but was not finally transmitted in-vision as such until as early as in April 1980. In 1978 the BBC went on strike just before the Christmas of that year, thus blocking out the transmission of both channels and amalgamating all four radio stations into one.

The BBC Research Department has played a major part in the development of broadcasting and recording techniques. In the early days it carried out essential research into acoustics and programme level and noise measurement.

The 2004 Hutton Inquiry, and the subsequent report raised questions about the BBC journalistic standards and its impartiality. This lead to resignations of senior management members at the time.

The BBC is a nominally autonomous corporation, independent from direct government intervention. It is currently run by an appointed Board of Governors, with this being replaced by the BBC Trust from January 2007. General management of the organisation is in the hands of a Director-General appointed by the governors.

Michael Grade, then Chairman of the Governors, was to become Chairman of the Trust at the time of the announcement, but due to his move to ITV, Chitra Bharucha becomes Acting Chair. A new appointment to the Trust will be made by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

The principal means of funding the BBC is through the television licence, costing around £11 a month if paid by direct debit (as of July 2006). Such a licence is required to operate a broadcast television receiver within the UK. The cost of a television licence is set by the government and enforced by the criminal law. The revenue is collected privately and is paid into the central government Consolidated fund, a process defined in the Communications Act 2003. Funds are then allocated by the DCMS and Treasury and approved by Parliament via the Appropriation Act(s). Additional revenues are paid by the Department for Work and Pensions to compensate for subsidised licences for over-75's. For this reason the BBC is sometimes referred as a "state" broadcaster as the state controls the BBC's funding.

Income from commercial enterprises and from overseas sales of its catalogue of programmes has substantially increased over recent years.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> with BBC Worldwide contributing some £145million in cash to the BBC's core public service business.

According to the BBC's 2005 Annual Report,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> its income can be broken down as follows:

£2,940.3m licence fees collected from consumers.

£624.3m from BBC Commercial Businesses.

£247.2m from the World Service, of which £225.1m is from grants (primarily funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office), £16.7m from subscriptions, and £5.4m from other sources.

£23.5m from other income, such as providing content to overseas broadcasters and concert ticket sales.

Renovation of Broadcasting House began in 2002 and is scheduled for completion in 2010. As part of a major reorganisation of BBC property, Broadcasting House is to become home to BBC News (both television and radio), national radio, and the BBC World Service. The major part of this plan involves the demolition of the two post-war extensions to the building and construction of a new building<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> beside the existing structure. During the rebuilding process many of the BBC Radio networks have been relocated to other buildings in the vicinity of Portland Place.

In 2007/2008 BBC News is expected to relocate from the News Centre at BBC Television Centre to the refurbished Broadcasting House in what is being described as "one of the world's largest live broadcast centres".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

By far the largest concentration of BBC staff in the UK exists in White City. Well known buildings in this area include the BBC Television Centre, White City, Media Centre, Broadcast Centre and Centre House.

BBC News is the largest broadcast news gathering operation in the world,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> providing services to BBC domestic radio as well as television networks such as BBC News 24, BBC Parliament and BBC World, as well as BBCi, Ceefax and BBC News Online. New BBC News services that are also proving popular are mobile services to mobile phones and PDAs. Desktop news alerts, e-mail alerts, and digital TV alerts are also available.

BBC News services are widely regarded as being amongst the best in the world, and evidence suggests that during a major national or international event such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the 7/7 bombings in London or a Royal Funeral people will tune into the BBC's coverage as opposed to its commercial rivals.

On the day of the 7/7 bombings, the bbc.co.uk website recorded an all time bandwidth peak of 11 Gb/s at 12:00 on 7 July. BBC News received some 1 billion total hits on the day of the event (including all images, text and HTML), serving some 5.5 terabytes of data. At peak times during the day there were 40,000 page requests per second for the BBC News website. The previous day's announcement of the 2012 Olympics being awarded to London caused a peak of around 5 Gb/s. The previous all time high at bbc.co.uk was caused by the announcement of the Michael Jackson verdict, which used 7.2 Gb/s [1].

The BBC has five major national stations, Radio 1 ("the best in new music"), Radio 2 (the UK's most listened to radio station, with 12.9 million weekly listeners<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>), Radio 3 (specialist-interest music such as classical, world, arts, drama and jazz), Radio 4 (current affairs, drama and comedy), and Radio 5 Live (24 hour news, sports and talk).

In recent years some further national stations have been introduced on Digital audio broadcasting including Five Live Sports Extra (a companion to Five Live for additional events coverage), 1Xtra (for black, urban and gospel music), 6 Music (less mainstream genres of music), BBC 7 (Comedy, Drama & Kids shows) and BBC Asian Network (British South Asian talk, music and news in English and in many South Asian languages), a station which had evolved from BBC Local Radio origins in the 1970's and still is broadcast on Medium Wave frequencies in some parts of England. In addition the BBC World Service is now also broadcast nationally in the UK on DAB.

For a world-wide audience, the BBC produces the Foreign Office funded BBC World Service, which is broadcast worldwide on shortwave radio, and on DAB Digital Radio in the UK. The World Service can be received in 139 capital cities worldwide and is a major source of news and information programming for over 140 million listeners worldwide. The Service currently broadcasts in 43 languages and dialects (including English), though not all languages are broadcast in all areas.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 2005, the BBC announced that it would substantially reduce its radio broadcasting in Eastern European languages and divert resources instead to a new Arabic language satellite TV broadcasting station (including radio and online content) in the Middle East to be launched in 2007.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

All of the national BBC radio stations, as well as the BBC World Service, are available over the Internet in the RealAudiostreaming format. In April 2005 the BBC began trials offering a limited number of radio programmes as podcasts.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Historically, the BBC was the only radio broadcaster in the UK until 1967 when University Radio York (URY), then under the name Radio York, was launched as the first (and now oldest) legal independent radio station in the country.

BBC One is a regionalised TV service which provides opt-outs throughout the day for local news and other local programming. In the Republic of Ireland the Northern Ireland regionalised BBC One & BBC Two are available via analogue transmissions deflecting signals from the North and also carried out on Sky Digital, NTL Ireland and Chorus.

Since 1975, the BBC has also provided its TV programmes to the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS), allowing members of HM Forces serving all over the world to watch and listen to their favourite programmes from home on two dedicated TV channels.

The bbc.co.uk [2]website, formerly known as BBCi and before that BBC Online, includes a comprehensive, advertisement-free news website and archive. The BBC claims the site to be "Europe's most popular content-based site"<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and boasts that 13.2 million people in the UK visit the site's more than 2 million pages.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> According to Alexa's TrafficRank system, in July 2006 bbc.co.uk was the 13th most popular English Language website in the world,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and the 23rd most popular overall.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

The website allows the BBC to produce sections which complement the various programmes on television and radio, and it is common for viewers and listeners to be told website addresses for the bbc.co.uk sections relating to that programme. The site also allows users to listen to most Radio output live and for seven days after broadcast using its RealPlayer-based "Radio Player"; some TV content is also distributed in RealVideo format. A new system known as iPlayer is under development, which uses peer-to-peer and DRM technology to deliver both radio and TV content for offline use for up to 7 days. Also, through participation in the Creative Archive Licence group, bbc.co.uk allowed legal downloads of selected archive material via the internet.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In recent years some major on-line companies and politicians have complained that the bbc.co.uk website receives too much funding from the television licence, meaning that other websites are unable to compete with the vast amount of advertising-free on-line content available on bbc.co.uk.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Some have proposed that the amount of licence fee money spent on bbc.co.uk should be reduced — either being replaced with funding from advertisements or subscriptions, or a reduction in the amount of content available on the site.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In response to this the BBC carried out an investigation, and has now set in motion a plan to change the way it provides its online services. bbc.co.uk will now attempt to fill in gaps in the market, but will guide users to other websites for currently existing market provision. (For example, instead of providing local events information and timetables, users will be guided to outside websites already providing that information.)
Part of this plan included the BBC closing some of its websites, and rediverting money to redevelop other parts.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> More recent information on web plans at [3]

Union membership is a private matter between staff and their chosen union: staff are not automatically covered by a union, but since the BBC is a large employer (in the media sector), membership numbers are considerable.[citation needed]

Staff at the BBC are normally represented by BECTU, along with journalistic staff by the NUJ and electrical staff by Amicus. Union membership is optional, and paid for by staff members and not by the BBC.

Historically, the BBC has been subject to continuing criticism for various policies or perceived biases since its inception<ref>Burns, Tom; quoted in BBC Handbooks, Accounts and Annual Reports, 2+38-2001/2 Chignell, Hugh; Bournemouth University, undated. Accessed 11 November 2006.</ref> and more recently over its coverage of events in the Middle East[citation needed] and the controversy over what it described as the "sexing up" of the case for war in Iraq by the government, for which the BBC was heavily criticised by the Hutton Inquiry<ref>The Hutton Inquiryinto the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly. Accessed 11 November 2006.</ref>, although the latter charge was much disputed by the British press.<ref>CNN on the reaction of the British press to the final report, dated 29 January 2004. Accessed 11 November 2006.</ref>

Coulton, Barbara. - Louis MacNeice in the BBC - Writer and producer from 1941 to 1961 in the Features Department of BBC radio. - Faber & Faber, 1980. ISBN 0-571-11537-3

Gilder PhD., Eric. - Mass Media Moments in the United Kingdom, the USSR and the USA. - Historical background relating to the British Broadcasting Company, Ltd., its founding companies; their transatlantic connections; General Post Office licensing system; commercial competitors from Europe prior to World War II and offshore during the 1960s. - "Lucian Blaga" University of Sibiu Press, Romania. 2003. ISBN 973-651-596-6

Milne, Alasdair. - The memoirs of a British broadcaster - History of the Zircon spy satellite affair, written by a former Director General of the BBC. A series of BBC radio programmes called "The Secret Society" led to a raid by police in both England and Scotland to seize documents as part of a government censorship campaign. - Coronet, 1989. - ISBN 0-340-49750-5

Moran, Lord. - Churchill at War 1940 to 1945 - The Memoirs of Churchill's Doctor, with an introduction by Lord Moran's son, John, the present Lord Moran. - This diary paints an intimate portrait of Churchill by Sir Charles Watson, his personal physician (Lord Moran), who spent the war years with the Prime Minister. In his diary, Moran recorded insights into Churchill's character, and moments when he let his guard down, including his views about the BBC being riddled with communists. - Carroll & Graf, 2002. Reissue ISBN 0-7867-1041-1

Parker, Derek. - David & Charles - Radio: The Great Years - History of BBC radio programmes from the beginning until the date of publication. 1977. ISBN 0-7153-7430-3